Building an unlikely project

Since a couple of years I initiated an unlikely project. We have no backlog. We have no meetings. We communicate mostly in pairs. We have no manager. We work completely remote even if most of us are located in the same city. Everything we do is open-source. We are not paid. We work as a closed team. And others want to join our team but they have to go through an interview. Everyone has veto right.

We aim to reinvent how developers work. We have a clear philosophy of the quality of what we want to achieve, but we do not know how it looks like. We cannot know because nobody ever created something like this. We guide our work through the stories we can tell with our system, and we are throwing much of the code away. We already delivered two significant versions, earned international recognition, and now we are in the process of rewriting everything from scratch.

This talk tells a story of this project and explores the conditions for making something like this possible.

Bio

Tudor Gîrba (http://tudorgirba.com) obtained his PhD in 2005 from the University of Bern, and he acts as software environmentalist at feenk gmbh, a consulting and coaching company that he founded (http://feenk.com).

He advocates that software assessment must be recognized as a critical software engineering activity, and he authored the humane assessment method (http://humane-assessment.com) to help teams to rethink the way they manage large software systems and data sets.